The Trump Regime, Fascism, and You

Fascism has deeper historical roots, but the earliest acts and events that can be tied to its widespread rise early in the 20th century date to the early 1920s.

Racial supremacy, exclusionary nationalism, and fascism, started up or grew from earlier roots in the US, UK, France, Mexico, Spain, Italy, Germany, and many other places. In 1922 it would have been impossible to predict which nation or nations would give rise to a charismatic dictator with one or another final solution. (Probably Germany, yes, but Germany and what two or three other nations?)

The rise of facism consisted of acts of containment, harassment, and sanctioned theft by governments, as well as violent attacks against target groups and displays of martial power by both private mobs and governments. It involved individuals popping in and out of popularity, as populists, occasionally winning elections. It involved elected officials carrying out regular streams of illegal acts, and a great deal of corruption in the ranks of their supporters.

In other words, it looked like today.

The rise of facism took 17 years before the first Jews were put in German run ghettos (in Poland). But about half way to that point, facism had become unstoppable.

That is why the famous quote is famous. Learn and remember it.

That is why people today are making a legitimate comparison between things happening now, like putting assylum seeking toddlers in dog kennels, or neo Nazis marches, and then.

So, let us repeat:

First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Socialist.

Then they came for the Trade Unionists, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Trade Unionist.

Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—
Because I was not a Jew.

Disagreement is treason. “The critical spirit makes distinctions, and to distinguish is a sign of modernism. In modern culture the scientific community praises disagreement as a way to improve knowledge.”

I do like and agree with this.
It’s necessarily brief, because the context is a list of bullet points.
But there’s certainly much to expand on this.
I strongly get the idea with science that disagreement is only condoned if it’s conducted within the sort of pre approved framework.
Same with law. ( nobody likes a vigilante particularly, going outside the court/legal framework ). ( Damn, I’ve just thought of a vigilante thingy that’s quite common and widely approved, oh well , although it’s about restitution outside a legal framework, not retribution ).
What I sense in a lot of modern political discourse is no set framework at all!
Everyone has their own method.
My guess is the um, winners?, ain’t gonna be the ones necessarily who are correct, but those who succeed in the most accessible format or framework, even if that format or framework isn’t particularly efficient, like the science format is.
Sort of like a medium being more powerful than a message idea. Sorta.

Okay here are some standard poly sci criterion for determining whether a government is fascist or not. Protesting injustice is not on the list, RickA. Let’s see how many we’ve met already under Trump: [ Hint for those who don’t want to read further….. We have met all of them under Trump. ]

1. Powerful and Continuing Nationalism – Check. See Steven Miller, Steve Bannon and Sebastian Gorka if you have any questions on this. Also absolving the naziis nationialists in Charlottesville. Check.
2. Disdain for the Recognition of Human Rights – Double Check. We just left the UN Human Rights group AND we are stripping nursing babies away from their mothers and putting them in prison. Any questions on this??
3. Identification of Enemies/Scapegoats as a Unifying Cause – Double Check . See for reference immigrants, gays, and Muslims.
4. Supremacy of the Military – Trump is always cozying up to the military. His chief of staff is a general. Check
5. Rampant Sexism – I can grab em by the pussy, Donny. Check
6. Controlled Mass Media – Media having trouble getting into immigrant child detention facilities. Non-FOX media getting squeezed out and labeled enemies of the state. Check.
7. Obsession with National Security – Gotta have a border wall!!!! Check
8. Religion and Government are Intertwined – Jeff Sessions citing the Bible to justify human rights abuses. check.
9. Corporate Power is Protected – Check.
10. Labor Power is Suppressed – Check.
11. Disdain for Intellectuals and the Arts – Trump is criticizing elites. He is going against the advise of experts in the EPA and NOAA. Check.
12. Obsession with Crime and Punishment -Trump wanted to execute the innocent Central Park five. Check.
13. Rampant Cronyism and Corruption – Jared, Ivanka, Donny Jr., ; Scott Pruit; Stinky Zinke. And On and On. Check.
14. Fraudulent Elections – Well, Russia had its nose under our election tent, now, didn’t they. Maybe the whole election wasn’t invalidated, just slightly putrified. Check.

So basically we have met all the classic characteristics of a fascist government, in whole or in leaning. Now what, people, now what?

Luckily there are checks.
The nominal head of the USA government can’t really do everything they want, immediatly, on a whim.
Trump was clear and articulate ( as much as the moron could be ) about his desire for torture. That didn’t happen as far as I know.
In a way, this whole Trump as facist thing is a good stress test of the yank system.

No mikeN, the scapegoating of Jews in Germany began immediately after WWI, when the major reason for the loss was placed on them (not mentioning the fact that anti-semitism was rampant prior to the first world war). In 1919 Paul von Hindenburg and Erich Ludendorff testified before the National Assembly and implied Jews had “stabbed Germany in the back” during WWI. Jews were linked to the details of the restrictions put on Germany after the war.

In the early 1920s the Süddeutsche Monatshefte (a magazine whose lead editor was Jewish) ran an image of a German soldier with a large knife in his back. It was taken as more “evidence” that Jews had worked against Germany in the war.

The Spartacist uprising, planned to “mimic” the Russian revolution, with several leaders who were Jewish, was taken by the right as more evidence that Germany’s real enemies were the Jews, and they (the right) pushed it as an attempt of revolution for dictator ship of the Jews.

Germany was far from “Jewish friendly” in the years between the two wars. It wasn’t really that before the first war.

1922. I woulda picked somewhat wrongly. Japan, Belgium, Turkey and the UK . Maybe Russia.
Never woulda guessed at Spain or Italy.
Germany? Nah.
Woulda put a bet on UK and Belgium if it was possible at the time. So fucking deranged to start with. Easy pickings for a persuasive communicator.
It’s a tricky game to play.

Neither Obama nor Trump used dog cages, although wire walls make it look like such. The difference is that the 2014 pictures show older children who came on their own, in large numbers, over-loading the placement system. The pictures show what was a short-term, jury-rigged, system. Horrible, but short-term and quickly ended.

Not anything close to the new policy of automatically taking children of all ages, even infants, from parents, and putting them in these locations with no plans of reuniting them with parents.

Obama’s policy quickly ended because a federal court in California ruled against, later upheld by 9th circuit. It wasn’t just for unaccompanied minors. They expressly instituted the policy for parents with kids as a deterrent, and the argument they made in court was that the Flores settlement only applies to unaccompanied children. Jeh Johnson video is available admitting this was put in as a deterrent.
For Trump, the deterrence is secondary to the primary policy of prosecuting every illegal immigrant.

Almost close about the California ruling mikeN. That decision said the policy of detaining mothers and children together had to end because the centers did not meet the standards laid out in a 1997 ruling about such things.

The fact that the situation there did not involve children separated from parents, with conditions on par with to better than the conditions in which these separated children are currently being kept, should do two things: make you wish for a judiciary that had balls enough to stand up to deplorable actions by a president, and make you realize just how disgusting Trump’s actions have been.

Only the lowest class of people would try to leverage it as a defense of Trump and indictment of Obama.

I don’t see a difference between refusing Sanders, in spite of what a disgusting person she is, and refusing to make a cake for a gay marriage because you’re a bigot trying to hide behind religion. Both denials of service are wrong.

“I don’t see a difference between refusing Sanders, in spite of what a disgusting person she is, and refusing to make a cake for a gay marriage because you’re a bigot trying to hide behind religion. Both denials of service are wrong.”

Big difference.

The Sanders group showing up in a place of business staffed by people who are migrants or linked to migrants is a direct threat. It might be crazy for you or me to imagine this, but for these folks, the face of the very people who are tearing children away from families, illegally, and who have been harassing and jailing immigrants as well as citizens and green hard holders for two years is a scary thing, a direct threat.

Being asked to make a cake is not the same thing as worrying that the children in your household will be taken away because your co-worker pissed off a big scary white lady who is a known asshole in an administration known to use their power in a vindictive way.

Make a gay cake. Have the children in your household abducted. Not the same!

” The honest merchant is a servant of the people! He who charges excessive prices is an enemy of the people! Good products — fixed prices. Higher sales — Less exploitation. ”
From a National Socialist cartoon

“Fascism is about empowering the state with Big Corporations and Big Labor buttressed to support The State. Somehow this is not in the list.” – An apparently wrong and propaganda statement written by MikeN, June 25, 2018.

On May 2, 1933, Adolf Hitler’s storm troopers occupied all trade union headquarters across Germany, and union leaders were arrested and put in prison or concentration camps. Fascism does not use Big Labor to support The State. Why would you repeat such a stupid falsehood, MikeN? Why doesn’t the truth matter to you?

Actually, Trump’s tweet is meaningless, because that is already allowed. Illegal immigrants can be deported without trial, without due process. It was only in the last two months that they decided to add prosecution for every illegal. Unless Trump meant his tweet to say refugees, it was intended as a distraction.

“Nazism is a form of fascism and showed that ideology’s disdain for liberal democracy and the parliamentary system, but also incorporated fervent antisemitism, scientific racism, and eugenics into its creed.”- Wikipedia

Our current president is displaying behavior which is completely consistent with fascism. He is of the belief that only a strong male leader, a dictator, can successfully run this nation. Fascism is anti-democracy, nationalist, and racist. Fascism exploits the parts of the brain that we appear to have in common with reptiles or birds.
Reptiles have remarkably little concern for things like compassion, empathy, science, or the arts, in my experience. And neither do Trump supporters, in my experience. Curious.

Trump wants to suspend the rule of law. His supporters do not want to work within the current system of civilization, apparently. Apparently they want to destroy it, to different degrees of course, some want to just pull out the finger nails, some want to draw and quarter it. But there is no satisfaction with the status quo because normal ongoing human difficulties have been propagandized to be overarching concerns which require reptilian scapegoats to rectify. These problems are handled with a pecking order, like a bunch of birds, that they can instinctively act upon. These problems require the powerful alpha reptile father figure to solve through internal struggle. Need a better job? Don’t go to night school. Don’t move to a different locale. Blame a foreigner!

People like MikeN seem to know that the country is leaning fascist, and they apparently seem to like some or all of the features of that, and they seem to be redefining fascism so that it can be viewed as an acceptible alternative to democracy.

Fascism is not an acceptable alternative to democracy. Fascism results in the dehumanization of the whole human experience. It devolves us to a pre-tribal, lower animal level of behavior and, ultimately, that is the the cause of its own downfall.

Don’t try to justify or sanitize authoritarian fascism, MikeN, unless you are OK with being a traitor to America and democracy.

There’s Fascism, and there’s fascism, which tends to focus on the means and not the ends.

From wikipedia:
Italian Fascism promoted a corporatist economic system whereby employer and employee syndicates are linked together in associations to collectively represent the nation’s economic producers and work alongside the state to set national economic policy. This economic system intended to resolve class conflict through collaboration between the classes.

Your (sic) better off just arguing that if it was wrong then, then it’s wrong now. The problem with charging hypocrisy is that it means you are admitting guilt.

Read my comment about Obama’s actions carefully mikeN. I never defended it: I said (correctly) that it was not as evil as Trump’s. That was the point of wishing for a judiciary with the balls to stand up to a president’s actions: they did to Obama but they’re rolling over for the scum who’s currently in office.

Actually, Trump’s tweet is meaningless, because that is already allowed. Illegal immigrants can be deported without trial, without due process.

Again, partially correct, but (intentionally?) misleading.

Courts have consistently ruled that anyone on US soil is protected by the right to due process. This is likely the thing that Trump and his scummy supporters don’t like: why should anyone other than well-off white men have protection under the law?

As far as the expedited removal (kicking people out without due process) goes:

The George W. Bush administration first enacted an expedited removal policy in 2004, which allows for undocumented immigrants to be deported without a trial only if they’ve been in the country illegally for under two weeks and were apprehended within 100 miles of the border .

Expedited removal can be avoided if the immigrant requests asylum. In that case the US Citizenship and Immigration Service (not a judge) is required to review the case.

Of course, we need to keep stressing the frame of lies all of Trump’s actions are built on

– That illegal immigration is out of control. No, it’s at historic lows
– That the people coming over are criminals (beyond the misdemeanor offense that is illegal immigration) and terrorizing the US. Again — data has long shown that they are less likely to commit crime than “real Americans”
– That they are a net drain on the economy. Nope, we’ve known for many years, and it was just supported by another study, that they are a net plus to the economy, paying back far more in taxes and money spent than they “suck away”

As rickA, mikeN, and billyR all demonstrate, their preferred biases
and flat-out bigotry is more comfortable than hard facts.

Dean, it was a response to Lionel looking for talking points. I disagree that Obama’s action was less evil than Trump’s. It is clear Obama did family separation as a deterrent. Statements from Trump’s team can also be found, but it is not as clear they intend a deterrent and looks like they are being taken out of context. If they did, then the two are the same. If the separation is only a consequence and not the intent of Trump’s policy, that is a little better. The difference is in Trump’s case, it is a court ruling that would prevent family detention, while in Obama’s they wanted family separation as a deterrent. Obama eventually chose catch and release as his policy for asylum seekers. I think both presidents could have used the flight risk loophole in the court ruling to detain everyone. About half don’t show up for later court appearances.

Republicans are not making any sense at all any more. They are siding with our adversaries the Russians; They are completely tolerant of lying and misrepresentation; Now that they are shown conclusive evidence that they are participants in a Fascist enterprise, they are trying to sanitize and justify Fascism. Republicans, you are a sorry lot. You are neither honorable nor trustworthy. As long as the Republican Party and the Russian backed NRA guarantees you guns, you are willing to slide back into a geological epoch that I term the Putrescine. It is an era where you are judged suitable for your role by your race, religion, and gender. It is an epoch that truly stinks.

No mikeN, the Obama administration did not routinely take children from families. The pictures of children on their own were older children who arrived at the border alone — no family attending. That was pointed out above.

The officials from Obama’s administration said the situations where children were removed from the adults that accompanied them were situations rare but where proof or strong suspicion of trafficking was present.

Neither of those excuses the conditions the children were kept in, but saying the policy was worse than Trump’s is a flat out lie. So was the “This is the Democrat’s law” shit that Trump tried for a time. Trump’s policy is far, far worse than Obama’s: actions (not always the best) in the interest of the children were taken during Obama’s years: nothing of the sort has occurred in Trump’s plan. Defending this and what it will do to the children is a new low for you.

I realize the vast majority of detained kids then and now were unaccompanied minors. I remember seeing a video of an Obama person, perhaps Jeh Johnson, saying that they separated kids as a deterrent. It’s possible I misunderstood that, in which case the policies would be equal. Trump is not allowed to do what Obama did because of the court decision. Obama after the court decision chose catch and release, Trump chose arrest the parent and hold them while their asylum application is pending, and release the kids to either foster care or a relative.

In a day of Fascist victory, the Supreme Court has upheld a ban on people based on religion, and with the deciding vote of Neil Gorsuch who was installed only after the Republicans blocked Obama from making a pick as should have been his prerogative. Sonia Sotomayor’s dissent to the majority decision is worth reading:

It’s worth noting that they Court also overturned the Korematsu decision that permitted American Japanese to be rounded up and put into detention camps, but they seem completely blind to the fact that they’re today perpetrating a decision just as bad.

In other fascist-favouring news, North Korea is upgrading its nuclear capacity:

Whilst this might appear to be a move in the right direction to the mythic moral integrity that many believe made US America great in the past (and I’m pleased to see a young Latino woman elected), I suspect and fear that this will be fuel for the Trump cancer that feeds the lizard-brain hatreds of the growing conservatism that infects the country. Given that any other president would have been removed from office a hundred times over in any previous government for what Trump blithely gets away with now, I suspect that he will use this to his advantage and make it more difficult for the Democrats to win back sufficient states to make a difference.

With a few more of the confluences of the sort that stole for Trump the election in 2016, US Americans might discover in the near future that they’ve suddenly become Republic of Gileadeans…

It is not a religious ban – it is a nation ban. The class of Syrians and so forth. Of course the President has this power, and many previous Presidents exercised the same power, as to the same nations.

Forced speech – Calf. cannot force pregnancy crisis centers to speak the way the State would like. And public unions cannot force non-members to have to support their political speech. Unions will have to amend their contracts so as not to have to provide free services to non-members – so look for that to spread nationwide as a result of this decision. Soon, all contracts will only require union representation for union members – and people who don’t want to join will not have to pay anything to the union. That is only fair.

A suit that will be sure to come in the future will be forced speech related to personal pronouns. Calf. has a law (passed the Senate – not sure if signed into law yet) requiring employees to use the preferred pronoun of a fellow employee – regardless of the personal opinion of the other employee. Forced speech – I wonder how the court will rule?

In my opinion, a person is free to perceive themselves as any gender they wish. But their perception stops at forcing me to agree with it. If I happen to believe that a person cannot change sex (this is a fact), than I cannot and should not be forced to use the wrong pronoun just to satisfy another persons nonfactual view of reality. I might just to be polite, but I shouldn’t be forced by law to speak opposite to my beliefs (and reality). Again, forced speech and it will be interesting to see the law develop in this area.

Similarly, can soldiers be forced to shower with a trans person who has had gender reassignment surgery and who the military now treats as having changed sex (a holdover from Obama – but they literally change the F to an M and visa versa, in the Military records after surgery). The Obama administration focused on the right of the trans person – but what about the privacy rights of the other soldiers? I believe this will be a major focus of future litigation as well.

It is one thing to allow a person to perceive themselves as being of a different gender, and dress accordingly. It is another thing entirely to require people to shower and use bathroom facilities with people of the opposite sex. There are privacy rights, religious rights and probably other rights which are implicated, that litigation will sort out and we will see what happens in the future.

Also noteworthy – the court dismissed the crazy public nuisance lawsuit against the Oil companies. Another sound application of the law to the facts. As I have said all along, the benefits of fossil fuels far outweigh their costs. I still think we need to boost our share of nuclear power from 20% to 80% (in the United States of course).

We live in interesting times and litigation brings these issues to the forefront, so we can discuss them on blogs like this.

I read the full dissent, and it is pages and pages of ‘here’s what Trump said about Muslims’. The dissent and the one by Breyer appears to say it’s OK coming from a different President, but not Trump. I don’t see how that can be constitutionally valid.

What bothers me more about this case is that a single court, backed up by a circuit court could effectively throw out a President’s policy because they disagreed with it and could come up with a semi-plausible constitutional argument against it.

What if there’s a genocide in progress, and a federal district judge declares that troops must be kept away, because the Constitution says only Congress has the power to declare war?

The DSA is engaged in targeting members of the Trump administration for protests at their houses, and now has elected at least one member. Yet somehow Trump is the fascist.

You have to make up your mind, either Trump is a ruthless authoritarian dictator, or members of his Administration can be attacked in the press and thrown out of restaurants and harassed on the street with little consequence.

So poor “little” Sarah Goebbels Sanders was asked to leave a restaurant . Authoritarians sure seem to hate it when someone disses one of their standard bearers. There she is, constantly upholding the new Republican standards of snotty dishonesty and injustice at her press briefings. And suddenly, a restaurant decided to use the new Supreme- Court-Authorized-Freedom-to-Deny-Service-Gambit on her! What could be more fair, just, and appropriate! But nooo, the Republicans all have their nickers in a twist because someone decided to exercise their constitutional right to pursue their happiness at poor “little” Sarah Goebbels Sanders expense. Go figure.

I guess the current interpretation of the constitution by the Republicans includes a caste system ( thanks LiD) , a monarchy, an intertwining of our government with the Russian mob, dehumanization as a sanctioned activity, and government approved fascism. M. Putin sends his thanks to Reince Priebus, for helping set this all up for us!
And remember, all votes are equal, but Putin’s is way bigger than yours!

But their perception stops at forcing me to agree with it. If I happen to believe that a person cannot change sex (this is a fact), than I cannot and should not be forced to use the wrong pronoun just to satisfy another persons nonfactual view of reality.

It shouldn’t surprise anyone that you’re a fan of showing no respect to others, nor should it be a surprise that you are stupid enough to conflate sex with gender.

It doesn’t excuse you from being the terrible person you are (it isn’t a religious ban? Fucking asshole) — you seem to revel in that.

I suspect the solution will be expedited processing. Keep the families together in detention for less than 20 days. Have the interview, decide and either grant or deny asylum. Boom done. Complies with all laws in place. Everybody will be happy.

Here is a description of some of behaviors which are can be considered crimes against humanity: ….. dehumanization, …. ethnic cleansing, deportations…. kidnappings and forced disappearances, military use of children, unjust imprisonment, torture, … political repression, racial discrimination, religious persecution….It sounds to me like some future court of justice, in a more just time, is very likely to consider Trump’s current behavior as being criminal in this regard. For instance, his dehumanization of immigrants, muslims, and people of color (e.g., Mexicans are rapists, he said) ; his deportations of people with legitimate claims to asylum by kidnapping their children and holding them hostage for ransom unless they “self-deport”; his political repression through the institutionalization of vote supression with the help of death’s head justice Gorsuch; The religious persecution of anyone who is not a Christian or Jew or flag worshipper by continually highlighting the “Judaeo Christian nature of Murka” and the religious need to respect the flag, first amendment and the establishment clause be damned!!! . ..The banning of entire nations based largely on their religion; The unjust imprisionment of legitimate asylum seekers; The actual documented torture and extreme psychological damage to infants and toddlers by forced separations from their mothers and subsequent inhuman no-touch, no-comfort treatment by their captors…. Trump is a modern mini-Hitler, and all his followers are blind little not-sees who have trouble identifying the humanity in other people.

If Trump is allowed to go on much longer without being stopped by Mueller or by a self-induced coronary, Our future could become very very stupid indeed.

rickA, you are dishonest as usual. Trump himself called it a ban against a religion. Convenient how you ignore that fact.

It is not I that conflate sex with gender

Except that the part I quoted earlier had you doing exactly that. Again, you lie out of habit.

No, there isn’t a factual error at all in what I said about you. I don’t doubt for a minute you don’t care — you gave up any moral core or sense of decency when you adopted your libertarian outlook: it’s a requirement for a “philosophy” that is simply the attitude of a snotty 5-year old.

Yes. But when it was written, it didn’t mention religion at all. It only mentioned countries. Including North Korea and Venezuela (is it a Roman Catholic ban?). So I disagree with your assertion that the travel ban is a ban against a religion. Fortunately, the Supreme Court agrees with me and not you.

You are entitled to your opinion of me, just as I am entitled to my opinion of you.

Fact was they could have done an arrest very easily. However, there were budget hearings going on, and the new President wanted to show that his party was serious about the deficit the Republicans ran up over 12 years. To protect their funding ATF decided to conduct a raid with media presence, and someone tipped off the raidees about it, and the result was the largest mass killings of minorities in US history.

That is one strange thing about respect, it has to be earned. This can be difficult and take time. Another strange thing is that respect can be so easily lost and believe you me respect for you is receding into the distance rather than coming nigh. Like negative equity, one can always sink lower. Keep going.

>with the deciding vote of Neil Gorsuch who was installed only after the Republicans blocked Obama from making a pick as should have been his prerogative.

Obama did make a pick, as was his prerogative. The Senate did not consent as was their prerogative. McConnell has been around long enough to remember when Biden said whoever is elected in the fall should make the pick if there was a vacancy.
Mitch McConnell invoked the Biden rule.

“Don’t try to justify or sanitize authoritarian fascism, MikeN, unless you are OK with being a traitor to America and democracy.”

I guess MikeN is okay with being a traitor to America and democracy.

We can actually defend our borders and homes without having to resort to reptilian cruelty, such a kidnapping infants and toddlers and isolating them from human touch. But people under the sway of a fascist leader don’t care to hear that. Do any of you cold hearted reptilian republicans realize how much damage taking an infant or toddler away from their mother does? Or , worse, how isolating that child from human interaction can create total psychological breakdown? This is a crime against humanity. This is a war crime. This is only one shade below murder. But if you never did any reading in developmental psychology, you wouldn’t know that would you. If you are wrapped up in your psuedo macho toxic masculinity, if you are afraid of human feelings, if your main concern is fear of looking weak, this won’t mean a thing to you. Like a T. Rex looking for lunch, you have no interest in compassion or intellect and especially no interest in some of the actual Judaeo Christian values that you shrilly squawk about as being your guide. Compassion for strangers? The good Samaritan? Fuck that, eh Republicans.

Republicans are sliding down the slope to fascism and not only do they not care, they are reveling in it.

It is an interesting time. Will Murka repeat the mistakes of Germany? Will Murka descent into totalitarian, authoritarian fascism? Will cruelty become ever more acceptable and dishonesty and injustice be the new rule of the land? Will scapegoating rise to the level of internment camps, slavery, and murder? That is, you know, where fascism leads. Trump doesn’t seem to care. Republicans don’t seem to care either.

Certain comments above, and notably StevePs, are very bloody well written.
One feels anger and heartbreak through the words.
So a compliment to the commenters on their writing.
A compliment on writing should not be taken as a condoning of position however.
I’m gonna try to articulate something but it won’t be good because I’m not academic.
Here goes. There’s a particular violence around non service . I can’t define it. But it’s there. It’s a quite awful violence.
If the correct, most efficient path to limiting and ceasing violence and having a harmonious society includes violent methods such as non service, it’s very problematic.
I’m not across all the ins and outs of ahimsa. But thats how it feels to me.
Problematic and hypocritical and ineffective. There’s a sort of immaturity about such a strategy.

LiD, Thank you for the compliment and thank you for the reminder about the paradox of using violence to stop violence. Here in the US we are watching our nation slide into barbarity. Tearing a nursing infant from its asylum seeking mother is certainly not ahimsa, especially when its apparent end is ethnic cleansing. Things look very grim at the moment here. The attachment of conservatives to the things that they think are good and holy threatens to keep this nation at a bronze age level of understanding. Christianity tried to elevate its followers from the bronze age level of development, and succeeded to some extent, but humanity does what humanity wants to do. Christianity apparently has, at its core, messages about rebirth and about the evil which is cruelty. Cruelty, unfortunately, is coming back into style, and fasicsm is, IMO, a very sad indication of that. Perhaps humanity will head this resurgence off. Perhaps not.

These days, the things that concern me are the failure to recognize the evil which is cruelty, and the failure to successfully counter or even care about massive waves of deception.

“slide into barbarity”
With respect, I must disagree.
Slide implies a high point.
Which year was some some high point when yanks were to a lesser degree a highly dysfunctional mob of barbaric pricks, to each other, and the wider world?
I’m trying to be real here, not just on some pedantic semantic pedestal.
I look upon the present as a continuation, rather than a slide.
Choose a year, any year, and check out the shit happening.

I really like your use of the term
cruelty, and I reckon that is definitely a theme to work with in the future, to move forward.
It’s something that is widely relatable by all. A common metric of emotion, sorta. Even if specifics vary widely.
It’s both intensely personal and societal.

At one time perceived a slide in my own country. After the M V Tampa affair.
A German friend was agog at the dynamic happening in society here after the Tampa shit went down.
But after some reflection, I came to the conclusion that barbarism isn’t spontaneous. It was always there.
By silent assent. Including my own.

Rachel Maddow is currently pointing the spotlight on some interesting GOP behaviour against Rod Rosenstein, if anyone’s near their TV/broadcast app. It’s become so bad that the Democrats have written to the FBI to advise them not to cave the the GOP congress-critters (H/T Eli) demands for every skerrick of information.

Basically, most of Congress doesn’t know that there is at least one grand jury, a team of prosecutors, and several IG investigations running right now. So Republicans are asking for things the FBI would rather not give up, and Democrats would like to keep this stuff secret.

The Republican howling against the Mueller investigation has reached fever pitch this week. US Americans need to seriously consider that Trump, with complete impunity and the support of the GOP, has flouted the Emoluments Clause, the 1967 Federal Anti-Nepotism Statute, and other laws and conventions too numerous to count.

If something doesn’t happen soon Trump will almost certainly have no compunction in turfing Mueller when the time comes that he feels it’s to his advantage, and with a new far-right conservative on the SCOTUS there will likely be no legal bulwark remaining against Trump’s growing authortarianism.

Further, Trump is doing his best to destroy NATO and the EU, whilst simultaneously pandering to every dictator on the planet. Putin could not have achieved a better result for Russia if he’d marched unopposed into the United States and sat in the Oval Office himself.

And too many of the citizens of the US sit on their hands, ignoring the direction in which their country is barrelling, not understanding what the rest of the world is seeing from the global perspective. Witness the imbeciles that support Trump on this very thread.

Whilst it was (somewhat…) unthinkable even 12 months ago, Trump could well (and likely does) consider himself to be above the law in everything, and if he can get a pliant SCOTUS to tell him that he can pardon himself then do not be surprised if he takes a shine to the idea of repealing the 22nd Amendment. With self-pardoning under his belt and a Republican Party that seemingly has its eye on becoming the Republic of Gilead Party, the last vestiges of US democracy could disappear before anyone’s had a chance to figure out if the Constitution has a contingency for saving itself and the country in the face of a president and a political party simultaneously gone rogue. I’d posit that even if there were time to respond, the Constitution would still fail in this regard, because when it was drafted there was no such thing as a single political entity that commandeered control of government…

And you can bet your bottom dollar that Putin probably knows more about US government law than does most anyone in the US government itself, no matter on which side of the chambers they sit. As a former KGB agent, watching and manipulating foreign governments were Putin’s stock-in-trade and he is a master at it. He’ll be playing his puppets with exactly this understanding in mind.

Given the skill with which Putin has already brought down democratic process in the US, and given that his puppets are rapidly debasing most of the legal instruments that might once have been able to stop Trump, it may be that the only recourse left to retain civil society in the US is for the military to step in with what would effectively be a coup d’etat. Whilst illegal under current US law, there is a loophole that might make such an extreme option plausible, and legal under international law, and that is the Nuremberg Principle IV – it is lawful to refuse an order from a superior who requests the commission of a crime against humanity. And US law is subject to international law in this case, should there arise an order that is covered by the Principle…

Alternatively the armed forces might just say “screw it, Trump and his abetters are wrecking the country and the Constitution” and step in regardless. If they were simply to remove the corrupted agents from office, perhaps with the backing of other security agencies, and attempt to reset effective democracy as quickly as possible, they could probably rely on leniency from any judgements…

It would be an extreme measure but given that Trump, Putin and the GOP are hellbent on purging US government of any chance of traditional democratic process this may be the last recourse before the nation become Gilead.

Bernard, you sound unwell. Trump in 2024 would be 78. That might be middle age for a Supreme Court justice, but while Trump might like the idea of repealing the 22nd and running again, there’s no chance. I’m not even sure he will run in 2020.
The EU has done a great job destroying democracy all by itself.

…while Trump might like the idea of repealing the 22nd and running again…

I didn’t say that he’d run himself, and I’m well aware of his age.

There are other agents though who would enjoy seeing the US follow China and Russia in keeping dictatorial leaders in for life, and Trump has shown time and again that he is sympathetic to their desires.

The bottom line is that Trump and the GOP are systematically removing or circumventing all the protections that were previously assumed to apply. Thus far no line in the sand has been demonstrated to exist for the rolling out of their fascist model of government…

“Basically, most of Congress doesn’t know that there is at least one grand jury, a team of prosecutors, and several IG investigations running right now. So Republicans are asking for things the FBI would rather not give up, and Democrats would like to keep this stuff secret.”

Do you expect anyone besides people who get sucked into fact free conspiracies to believe that bullshit?

I’ve just been reading about a little bit of USA history. Interesting powers the President and Secretary of Defence had, with regard to military use in an internal civilian legal matter.Perhaps still do have, dunno.
It seems Federal law was not being obeyed.
I’m a little curious if there’s some sort of movement to harmonize law, instead of a hotch potch all over the place.

The power grab by authoritarian forces has been described by the ever sensible robertscribbler:

“We should, perhaps, not be surprised. The republicans after all — through their vicious media campaigns, through their warping of the web, through Gerrymandering and voter suppression, and, yes, through collusion with hostile foreign powers — have taken both Houses of Congress and the Presidency combined. They have, through Trump, through Senate leadership, and through House leadership, eroded and removed practically all norms that would check a party in power. They are, in other words, clearing a way for the unjust application of a brutal authority. A brutality that most recently manifest in the cruel separation of children from parents seeking asylum at the border.”

I’m initially aghast at some of what Scribbles has written there.
It’s possible, because he’s a good writer, that he’s done it as an exercise, an experiment in gullibility and irony.
The appalling Churchill intro certainly sets such a tone.

“A nation forged in the fight against unjust authoritarian rule.”
That’s just absolute brilliance. A triumph of oratory. Of implication over reality.
It’s pamphleteering genius.
Only an absolute ignorant fuckwit would carry on like that sincerely.
And we know Scribbles is not an ignorant prick. Very far from it.
It’s unsettling to see this wordplay and style intermeshed with climate concerns. It’s like he’s taking the piss out of Driessens writing style, what with the faux nationalism and unyielding tone.

Ah, it’s just hit me why the ” forged ” line got me goat. It’s highly reminiscent of the insane Kelly and Eureka Stockade sentiment that permeates. Shit, even I’m a sucker for some of the Kelly bit.
The thing Is, see, it’s easy to be anti authoritarian. Any 3 year old goes hard on that.
Doing it well however, doing it with clarity and compassion and commitment, that’s a lot harder.
Yanks never had it. Christ they are useless.
Eureka mob of cockheads never had it.
Kelly might have had a bit. Might.

Now I am no outright fan of Winston Spencer Churchill but the quote from him is apt, warning us with an historically apposite quote. However what I was pointing up is the similarity in assessment between robertscribbler and Bernard J above.

Churchill was a self promoting aggrandise who manage to elevate his reputation with a dodgy tale about escape from Boer captivity. Now there is no question that Churchill could be courageous, unfortunately he never manage to develop a sense of naval strategy remaining what he was from his beginnings in uniform, a military hussar.

Churchill’s versions of history should be treated with a huge helping of salt for he glosses over the unfortunate results of much of his meddling in things of which he had an incomplete understanding.

Anybody familiar with the Battle Of Jutland will understand the hammering that Rear Admiral Beatty’s Battle Cruiser squadron suffered losing two of their six within about twenty minutes, when ranged against only five of similar German vessels, through a combination of poor preparation by Beatty particularly WRT gunnery (the British battle-cruiser’s guns in theory out-ranged those of Hipper but Beatty held fire until the Germans opened first) where few of the many British projectiles fired hit the target.

When hits were obtained, and this applied to the engagement of the 5th Battle Squadron (the 15 inch gunned Barham, Valiant, Warspite and Malaya) and the later engagement between the British Grand Fleet and Scheer’s High Seas Fleet, then the shells often broke up against the German armour or passed through softer structure without exploding. Those were just some of the problems with British shells which could have been discovered if the tests that Jellicoe desired had been carried out pre-war.

“The debate on shell quality that Jellicoe had supported was stifled by politicians like Churchill who spoke in Parliament, saying, ‘Although the German shell is a most formidable instrument of destruction, the bursting, smashing power of the British projectile is decidedly greater’. Even in July 1914, a mere few weeks before the outbreak of war, Jellicoe had delivered another pessimistic report to Churchill, much to the latter’s displeasure.”

‘Jutland the Unfinished Battle’, Nicholas Jellicoe. Page 139

The comparatively poor armouring of the British battle-cruisers compared to their German near equivalents was another factor in which Churchill had influence pre war when in a different government post. See e.g. ‘British Battleships of World War One’, R A Burt.

Beware of Churchillian versions of history .

Churchill and famine in India

““No great portion of the world population was so effectively protected from the horrors and perils of the World War as were the peoples of Hindustan. They were carried through the struggle on the shoulders of our small Island.”

Britain’s wartime prime minister did not discuss in his six-volume account the 1943 famine in the eastern Indian province of Bengal, which killed 1.5 million people by the official estimate and 3 million by most others. One primary cause of the famine was the extent to which Churchill and his advisers chose to use the resources of India to wage war against Germany and Japan, causing scarcity and inflation within the colony.”

‘Churchill’s Secret War’, Madhusree Mukerjee. Prologue page ix.

Read the whole of that Prologue for a description of the history of the impoverishment and extortion wreaked on Bengal, and other parts of India, since the inception of the British East India Company. Investigate Robert Clive and how he enriched the company and himself at the expense of the Bengal population. Prior to that history Bengal was recognised as a wealthy state with plentiful food supply and other riches with an egalitarian social structure.

Churchill had the gravitas to stir the pubic at times of great peril, that is true.

Ask any thinking Aussie about him though and they’re likely to have an unflattering view of him, considering his involvement (and cavalier incompetence in strategic matters) in using unsuspecting Australians and New Zealanders as cannon fodder at Galipoli in an effort to keep the eastern waterways open so that Britain could be assured of oil for its war effort.

Donald Trump does not have geopolitical intelligence. He does not have negotiating intelligence. He does not have economic intelligence. He doesn’t even have a statesman’s charisma. He got to where he is by being a bully with a lot of money, largely inherited or fraudulently or otherwise dishonestly acquired, and by saying the sort of populist tripe that makes a big enough minority crawl out of the woodwork in an electoral system that relies on optional voting, and bastardised by a lack of preferential voting. This rip in US politics has the nation on a precipice from which it is evermore unlikely to recover, and in giving succor to the dictatorships of the world Trump and the GOP will likely bring the Western democracies down with them.

Ask any thinking Aussie about him though and they’re likely to have an unflattering view of him, considering his involvement (and cavalier incompetence in strategic matters) in using unsuspecting Australians and New Zealanders as cannon fodder at Galipoli…

Indeed, I had that fiasco in mind for another post as my above was already rather long and there sure is plenty to show Churchill in an unfavourable light. with the Gallipoli debacle being near the top.

Reading the account by Stephen Roskill in ‘Churchill and the Admirals’ one is reminded that it was Churchill’s pig-headedness of insisting that a solely naval assault would achieve the task of capturing Constantinople.

Churchill used devious tactics to imply that he had support of the naval chiefs when in fact even Fisher considered the venture unlikely to succeed in the absence of a combined naval and military assault. Any naval force that did manage to break through to Constantinople on its own would have been extremely vulnerable given the extended lines of communication, with both sides of the strait being occupied by hostile forces for much of its length. Churchill should have paid more attention to history and Admiral Duckworth’s narrow escape out of such a particular bind in the Dardanelles in 1807. Sadly, it seems Churchill preferred to rewrite history in his favour rather than study it thoughtfully.

The fact that Turkey was in the war on the side of the Central Powers in the first place can be partly laid at Churchill’s door. Churchill the non specialist even in 1914 tried to exercise distant control over the actions of British admirals in the Mediterranean. Churchill’s ambiguously worded directives did not take account of the qualities, or lack thereof, of Admiral Sir Berkeley Milne (aka ‘The Great Arch Bark’ or ‘Arky-Barky’).

Milne (lacking the displayed ability of his grandfather Vice Admiral David Milne) had made a career out of fawning around royalty and thus rose in the ranks enough to be appointed by Churchill as C-in-C Mediterranean, against Fisher’s wishes.

In short, the ambiguous directive from Churchill to a C-in-C short of initiative allowed the German battlecruiser (panzercruizer – literally armoured cruiser) Goeben and the cruiser Breslau to break free into the Eastern Mediterranean where only the comparatively disparate and light, also slower, forces of Admiral Troubridge were available to halt the progress of the German units. That, when the German squadron was handed over to Turkey, Turkey came into the war formally aligned with Germany was blamed upon the hapless Troubridge who took the fall for a debacle not of his making.

“Where one may disagree with the authority [Arthur Marder], is in his placing the blame equally on the Admiralty and Troubridge, with Milne as a third delinquent, and ignoring Churchill’s personal share in the Admiralty’s contribution to the disaster. It may also be remarked that in the authorised biography of Churchill the author [Martin Gilbert] entirely glosses over the latter aspect of the muddle”

‘Churchill and the Admirals’ Stephen Roskill, 2013 page 33.

If that isn’t enough Churchill’s shadow also fell across British naval forces in the Pacific when because of Churchillian meddling Sir Cristopher Craddock, an intelligent and able officer, found himself in the invidious position of challenging von Spee’s force of two modern armoured cruisers plus a number of light cruisers with a force comprising two obsolete armoured cruisers totally outgunned by Spee’s pair of SMS Scharnhorst and SMS Gneisenau, crack gunnery ships of the German navy. Thus Craddock was even more disadvantaged from his ships having been hastily manned largely from reservists, new intakes and cadets. Churchill, the amateur, considered Craddock well supported by having the elderly pre-Dreadnought Canopus with her four 12 inch guns available, this vessel Craddock sent away because of her poor steaming reputation which would have made her just another vulnerable casualty. Troubridge’s fall from grace over the Goeben affair ensured that Craddock chose to die and at least impede the German squadron rather than refuse the challenge and be branded a coward. Craddock had done enough to ensure that Spee’s squadron had used about half of their non replaceable ammunition and much coal which ultimately led to their demise at the subsequent Falkland battle as they were breaking back to Germany.

“In part the responsibility for the successful concentration of the initially scattered German squadron must be placed on Churchill, since it was on his initiative that the plans of Admiral Sir Martyn Jerram, commander of the China Station, were radically altered by an order to concentrate at Hong Kong instead of in a position 900 miles to the south-east where he would have been far better placed to counter the southward move by von Spee.

…

Such was the diversion of the Australian Nav’s strength to cover expeditionary forces sent to capture the German colonies of Samoa and New Guinea at the Admiralty’s insistance, instead of being employed on catching von Spee’s force – which, as the senior officer on the Australian Navy Board and in command of the RAN squadron clearly realized, should be their primary objective.

…

There was some truth in the remark by an officer in one of the marauding German cruisers that ‘we had in the First Lord of the Admiralty, an involuntary ally.”

Im gonna ask a query of all here about something. About Trump in his rallies and writings pre election. I don’t watch telly so I missed it all pretty much. Caught the most outrageous things of course, in the papers. But none of the, I assume , more mundane things that must fill hours of speeches or interviews.
What I specifically am interested to know is, did he ever say anything he desired people to do? Like say, a vicar might at the end of a sermon. Be good to each other. Drive carefully. Show respect to elderly. Um, Keep your community clean. Or even something like, even though there is a massive threat from Mexicans, don’t be fearful. Go about your lives with optimism , or some shit.
Do yas get what I mean? Did Trump ever say anything at all in that manner? Cuz I’m not aware of it if he did.
I’m really curious, and would appreciate any feedback. I’m extra specially interested if Trump ever requested a physical thing to do.
Such as um, if ya wanna make America great again, keep fit, get as healthy as you can,
don’t litter and pick up ever bit of litter you see. Use stairs instead of escalator. Or some such. And extra super interested if there was any request by Trump about bearing or posture.

Nowwww…

The other day, someone said to me on the phone I should check out some Canadian bloke who’s some academic shrink type called Peterson. So I been checking. He’s rather popular with the rich young male cockheads in America, it seems. And he’s stepped on some toes in certain fields he’s not quite versed in. Got a touch of the old Dunning Kruger methinks.
Tonight I got around to looking at some sort of rules he’s made up as a sort of template for being an adequate person, or something like that.
And fucking BAM!!!! There it was. Rule one.
Right where it should be at the start.
Unbefuckinglievable! Posture.
His poxy rule 1 is this. Stand up straight with shoulders back.

Some older readers may be familiar with the following short ( 5 minuteish ) from an old film about an older ummm incident/ experiment about an
even older atrocious time and place prior to WW2.

Trump’s message to people is littered through his presentations: his supporters get the message that they can be racists and bigots without repercussion ’cause those are the things the country was founded upon, and that he’s doing wonderful things for the status of the country and economy despite all the evidence to the contrary.

In short: he’s telling them to be the same low level scum they were when they elected him.

I don’t think Peterson would be getting any attention at all if things had not gotten so bad that Trump’s statements and behavior is judged acceptable by so many people — look at the low levels of thinking, integrity, and knowledge rickA, mikeN, and billyR show when they trot out their (always wrong/fake/conspiratorial) comments.

More directly: Peterson is simply spouting the usual men’s rights bullshit but dressing it up in longer sentences that it’s usually wrapped in, so the weak minds eat it up. Sadly, he can’t be ignored because the crap he spreads (such as the notion that the male losers who are too dickish to have normal relationships “are owed” sex and there should be mandatory monogamy enforced for them to get it) is accepted by a large number of horrible people.

“In short: he’s telling them to be the same low level scum they were when they elected him.”
Thanks Dean for reply.
So what I’m getting from your observation is that Trump hasn’t particularly been manipulative, beyond perhaps indicating , “I accept you, will you follow me?”
And that’s all it took!!!!???? Golly, I can nearly see it. All these rich middle class yanks wanted was someone, anyone, to give them some acceptance. And even a complete fuckhead like Trump would suffice. Yeah, I can nearly see it.
It could be an even simpler mechanism going on than I thought it might be.

I went back and looked at Trump’s stump speech and spot checked a couple of more recent speeches.

I don’t really see any calls to action to the people like you are talking about.

He mostly talks about himself and what he wants to do and why it will make America Great Again (MAGA). He calls on Congress a couple of times, but not really on “the people”.

My perspective is that Trump won primarily because he wasn’t Hillary Clinton.

In my opinion, any of the 17 Republican primary runners would have beaten Hillary Clinton because none of them are Hillary. Trump won the primary because the didn’t or couldn’t control the number of primary runners. Had only two or three people run for the Republican nomination, it is my opinion Trump wouldn’t have won.

On the other hand, it is my opinion that any other democrat who wasn’t Hillary Clinton would have beaten any republican. Biden for sure would have beaten Trump or any of the other 16 republican candidates.

Of course I could be wrong – but that is my opinion.

Take it for what it is worth (it is free).

I have listened to Jordan Peterson (not sure of the spelling) and a couple of the other dark web guys (like Dan Rogen and Ben Shapiro) and enjoy them and their point of view. You should watch a couple of his youtube talks to get the full flavor of his point of view.

Thanks Ricks for reply and going so far as to reexamine footage.
How interesting. A decided lack of what I was on about, essentially one sort potential precursor to facism.
Finding out Peterson’s rule bloody one is enough for me not to watch any videos of him.
I do ok by reading mostly. I think I get what he’s on about ( but not sure why he’s on about anything in the way he is. )

“..longer sentences that it’s usually wrapped in, so the weak minds eat it up. ”
Hahaha. It occasionally crosses my mind to try to assist climate deniers in their lameness by coming up with better written plausible sounding ( to them ) arguments. Including much longer sentences than they normally write. They are dead set desperate for validation of the tweedy Oxbridge sort.
Not sure I could pass it off but I could try for fun.

“Golly, I can nearly see it. All these rich middle class yanks wanted was someone, anyone, to give them some acceptance. ”

Not only people who are well off. Remember that a big portion of Trump’s support came from folks aligned with the “tea baggers” — the group of racists funded by the right to oppose a black man who had been elected president. It is true that the tea baggers are people who are horrible — racist, bigoted, dishonest, misogynists, all the horrible traits Trump displays — but they are also make up a huge portion of the population the economy has left behind. That entire group was fed lies about HRC — the type that are short, easily shown to be false, but crafted cleverly enough to shift responsibility for their economic/social woes, real or perceived, to her in particular and the Democratic party in general. When people who have been in real difficulty are told that the n******er in the White House and his cronies ruined the economy and hurt them, that he’s a racist, etc., they see an easy scapegoat (and ignore the fact that Obama’s actions steered the economy away from the brink the Republicans had steered it toward). When the person telling the bulk of the lies and claiming to have proof the Democratic president was not a citizen and therefore was illegal promises to make the country great again (indicating that he meant “make it great” only for whites) they latched on.

The problem is that now, when it becomes widely clear that he meant great for men who are in the top 1%, they still believe he’s on their side.

There is a point, I suppose, to linking the creation of new jobs (expansion in old businesses and creation of new businesses) to support (i.e., investment) by people — now including corporations it seems — with enough wealth to be able to invest some of it in expansion and creation. But I don’t see how this applies to multibillionaires, currently at the small end of the wealth funnel. If their existing wealth isn’t enough to encourage them, I’d say they were unencourageable (sp?) and we ought to try something else.

Re Bernard J. Churchill’s “cavalier incompetence in strategic matters) in using unsuspecting Australians and New Zealanders as cannon fodder at Galipoli in an effort to keep the eastern waterways open so that Britain could be assured of oil for its war effort.”

I’m curious as to whether or not oil had a similar importance in WWI to what it had in WWII — prime importance — and if there was any realistic alternative to an “effort to keep the eastern waterways open” to assure that Great Britain’s oil supply would continue to be replenished. I’m not knowledgeable at all about WWI.

I’m curious as to whether or not oil had a similar importance in WWI to what it had in WWII…

It most certainly did. Simply: hence the Sykes/Picot agreement, Britain and France ensuring their own interests by carving up the Middle East into territories to reach agreement between the two competing nations and ignoring ethnic boundaries established for decades if not centuries. The formation of Syria (French Interest) and Iraq and Iran with adjacent territories from which oil was already being sourced.

The change from coal burning warships to those burning oil, sometimes a mix, began in the Royal Navy before WW1 and thus that commodity was of strategic importance even then.

But WRT Britain oil was not the only consideration for free access to the Suez Canal was also of strategic importance for moving ships, and trade, between home waters and the Far East.

The importance of Iran was also because it was adjacent to Afghanistan which also had strategic importance especially when considering any threat to India from Russia.

The ability of T E Lawrence to befriend and live with Arabs was a lynch pin in control of the Arabian peninsula and the defeat of the Turks there. Lawrence became disgruntled when post war treaties ignored the wishes of his Arab allies especially the shoddy treatment of Faisal I bin Hussein bin Ali al-Hashemi WRT Syria and Iraq.

That is a much simplified picture more detail can be found in the tittles in the bookmark intended montage I have created. It is he lower section that is of most relevance including the Balfour Declaration for the strategic need for a ‘western’ oriented nation state in that area was one of its drivers. Sadly with the dire consequences for the indigenous peoples since torn from their own lands by a policy which can only be described as ethnic cleansing, on which the volumes by Ilan Pappe inform.

I have been studying WW1 and the maritime, imperial and trade developments that lead up to it and beyond since being at school in the 1950s. I once gave a lecture on The Battle of the Atlantic (WW2) to an audience of my RN colleagues, which I began by presenting a large map of the world that I had drawn with the lines of trade from various parts annotated with quantities of the various goods shipped and frequency of sailings.

” maritime ”
May I share with you a nautical curiosity. Sort of trivia.
I read in a history book ages ago that a sailing ship going from one part of Russia to another part of Russia traveled via Sydney, when Sydney was a new city.
Sounds ridiculous but if the North is frozen then ya go down South past Europe and Africa, round Antarctica, and come up Australia’s East coast before headed towards Japan.
I spouse the winds were all working well for such a planned trip.
That railroad must have been truly wonderful when they finally built it.
Just thought I’d share. I quite like little oddities. I love how the Atlantic entrance of the Panama canal is west of the Pacific entrance.

Thank you so much. I appreciate your reply. I recognize in your description the old idea – at least as old as the Roman Republic – that it is perfectly normal and right for a people or nation to reorganize the rest of the world by force of arms or trickery to suit its own interest and convenience.

It is from the political machinations of those times, and the continuation of politics by other means aka war upon which I fear we are on the cusp once again, that we owe the state of the world today, but then that in itself is nothing out of the ordinary for history. Except for the fact we can now kill more people more quickly and spread even more suffering across the world.

The effects of climate change with a rising total from extreme weather events globally, with Japan being the latest contributor.

Then there is the severe dislocation of the populations of large territories over conflict for resources or migration away from lack of basic essentials such as potable water. Currently the situation in the Middle East and Central America also Africa.

Communities in the US are not immune from lack of available clean water.

The rising tide of pollution including attendant endocrine disrupters.

Then of course those murdered by repressive regimes – Saudi Arabia, Israel, Myanmar and more.

I see little hope of things improving RSN (as the late Jerry Pournelle used to put it), quite the reverse.

Don’t put Pournelle on too high a pedestal. Remember that he was one of the people who pushed the gullible President Reagan to adopt the original Star Wars program, and that he was a HUGE supporter of the “conclusions” made in in “The Bell Curve”. He lost all credibility (with me, at least) with his “This is the textbook perfect example of how population statistics should be done.” comment. Especially since the way the “analysis” presented in that book was often discussed as an example of how not to do statistics.

I agree WRT Pournelle, in BYTE he wrote much interesting stuff about computers but rarely anything that was of direct use to me. I could have rambled at length how I overcame various issues when transferring data from the disparate computer systems I once had here, some still lurk, But that would bore.

I mean how about setting up a DOS session in a window under Windows 3.1 itself running in a window under RISC OS so as to use the fax software supplied with a Speedster 28k8 modem to send a fax to my HQ over POTS (Post Office Telephones) and other fun stuff? (Trumpet Winsock anybody?)

Other fun stuff to answer a late evening plea for help from a bulletin board lurker for a Teletext screen from an 8-bit system (BBC Model B – Motorola 6502 type processor). Unusually I still had a Model with a Teletext box attached, I had written a screen save routine some time previously so could grab the required at the press of a key. The issue was then to move the file from a 5¼ floppy DFS system to a 3½ floppy system formatted to suit the data layout of a 32-bit computer, ADFS. I used my Acorn Electron with a double drive a 3½ and 5¼ in one housing to do the initial shift and then onto a Master 128 that understood the ADFS format of the 32bit machine to which a modem was attached (an old Amstrad 1200baud). The Master 128 had software available to move from DFS format to ADFS. Oh, I had to clean up the saved text screen to remove a flashing cursor artefact with a paint program before squirting it down the line through the modem.

I got a thanks with – how the F did you manage that? Cool at the time.

I got a few other calls to do similar strange things after that.

I once mixed it with CPM systems and also Apple ][s (Motorola 6502 again) doing assembler. No assembler software on the Apple so I assembled on the Electron and then saved out the code as Hex values to squirt into the Apple’s memory, and then save out an executable. I was thrown in at the deep end on the Apple but about four months later I had a guy from Kansas call up the outfit where I worked for help using interrupts. Anybody familiar with those Apple ][s will know what a dogs breakfast that memory area is.

I have read Linda Nagata’s The Nanotech Succession books and enjoyed them very much. I have not had the pleasure of reading the Red trilogy yet, but will add them (and the Last Good Man) to my reading list.

Going back to the original theme of this blog. A lot of things are going on in current American history that are concerning. While conservatives, right wingers, libertarians, and other racists called the Obama administration Nazis for the most ridiculous of reasons, those same people are apparently not able to grasp the fact that the current administration is moving towards divisive, racist, deceptive authoritarianism, and that Trump’s behavior is increasingly in the fascist mold and is nearly identical to nascent Nazism. Far more like Nazism than anything that Obama ever did. But the Republicans don’t, in general, seem to care! Cruelty to babies? They are criminals! Lock them up! Psychological torture to babies? That’s okay to a surprisingly high number of modern Republicans. This is one reason why Republicans are a shame and an embarrassment to America. And that is only one of many reasons.

I move that the Republican party should adopt the divine bird, musca domestica, as its mascot, to keep with the Lord of the Flies behavior of their leader and his followers.

Just when you think actions by these scum at any level can’t get any worse we see stories of immigration staff holding pregnant women for the “crime” of entering the country refusing medical treatment to pregnant women who end up having miscarriages while in custody and a case of a woman and daughter, re-entering the US after vacationing in Europe, being held and interrogated because the mother was guilty of having a different last name — she hadn’t taken her husband’s last name. The fact that she had all the required paperwork showing the girl was indeed her daughter didn’t matter: the advice from the customs people was that the next time she should get a note from her husband to “prove” she was actually the girl’s daughter. (And again, before the usual right-wing scum apologists jump in with misleading justification, she had all of the documentation the customs service says it needs. They didn’t care.)

Make no mistake, the rabid right has studied history and the power of dictators like Hitler to rouse the masses. Putin is a master of the same techniques, but exercises much more finesse. Oh, they’ve all cloaked the most overt expressions of their authoritarism and bigotries from explicit view, but they know how to dog whistle so well that the hounds hear the calls regardless.

And from a psychological perspective, it’s no small coincidence that Trump and Hitler hare a penchant for large rallies of fawning supporters…

Dean, that ‘mother and daughter required note from father to reenter country’ was happening when Obama was President too. It happened to a family member. But I guess some people find it convenient to label all bad things as caused by Trump.

So the right wing smears Obama for eight years, periodically calling him a nazi without even any tangible evidence that remotely linked him nazism, fascism, or authoritarianism. But if one today reads the things that Trump says and does, for example, saying that there were good people on both sides of the Charlottesville white supremacist rally, or calling Mexicans rapists and murderers, or ripping infants from their mothers’ breasts, one is able to make some legitimate comparisons between Trump and Hitler. Weird.

Weirder still that some right wing bloviator like Rich Lowry will say you are being tawdry and dumb for making that comparison. Again, the right wing is the one playing dumb. There is a legitimate comparison to be made between Trump and Hitler. Just for a start, both are racist ultranationalists playing to a base that seems to be growing more intolerant of minorities by the day.

Re Bernard J.: “the rabid right has studied history and the power of dictators like Hitler to rouse the masses.”

I think you may be giving them too much credit. I think it more likely that they are just typical authoritarians who long for an authority figure who will satisfy their need for someone to tell them what to do while also pandering to their need to feel superior and entitled relative to all groups other than their own. It’s more like:

“First they came for the Socialists, and I did not speak out –

Because Socialists are like Communists and hateful to all true Americans like me” and so forth.

Probably even simpler than that. Since reagan weaponized racism and the demeaning of the working class the right’s leadership has been pushing the line that opportunity, rights, and comfort are only for the well-off whites in society , and working hard to dismantle all of the social structures earlier generations put in place, and they they themselves used, so that: a) They could claim they made it on their own so everyone else should, and b) Make sure none of the icky non-whites or women could use them. Swallow the philosophy of the modern right and you become, as rickA, mikeN, etc., demonstrate terrible people.

Trump just embarassed the United States again. He is trying to bring his mobster act and tone to a NATO diplomatic summit. He is bringing all his training as a cadet drill master to a NATO summit. What flaming asshole. He is insulting peoples who have suffered the results of two world wars, people who have suffered the terrible results of fascism, with….ready now?…. More , new fascism!

Republicans, of course, with their tendency towards love and acceptance of sadistic cruelty, think this is just dandy! Bring your machine gun mouth to a diplomatic function! What a hoot! Yeah, will show those Europeans, won’t we!

BTW, regarding that Republican tendency towards the love and acceptance of sadistic cruelty, here are some examples if you doubt what I write;
Embracing water bording and other forms of torture without pushback or proof of efficacy;
Embracing corporal punishment for children ( despite copious evidence that it is counterproductive ) and capital punishment for innocent adults ( Central Park Five);
Defending the cruel and completely unnecessary psychological torture of the children of families who are seeking asylum;
Embracing the love of guns, those cruel tools of murder, mutilation, and heavy metal pollution, the popular concentration of which are clearly related to the rate of creation of pain and dispair by criminals, hunters, and other defectives;
Saturating the media with things like Fox news;
Saturating the media with right wing commentators and pundits who sneer at things like empathy, science, compassion, humanity, and rationality;
Raging against the LGBTQ community for being truthful about their orientation;
Embracing religious death cults ( Christianity comes to mind ) that feature eternal torture, eternal damnation, and, watch for it, a torture instrument as their symbol, their insignia;
Torturing the truth and truth tellers and people with any awareness higher than that of a mobster or protection racket customer.

Republicans are bringing us into an age of backwardness, barbarity, anti-intellectualism, and cruelty, one gut wrenching blunder at a time. They are bringing us back to a world custom made for the primitive mind.

Trump just embarassed the United States again. He is trying to bring his mobster act and tone to a NATO diplomatic summit.

Yeah, this blatant lie

“Many countries are not paying what they should. And, frankly, many countries owe us a tremendous amount of money for many years back, where they’re delinquent, as far as I’m concerned, because the United States has had to pay for them. So if you go back 10 or 20 years, you’ll just add it all up. It’s massive amounts of money is owed.”

is astounding. His statement about Germany being a “captive” of Russia is also asinine (at least if you have the ability to think and read: there’s a good chance one of the usual stooges who post here will “defend” this or the Nato one) as well.

Remember all of the false accusations of how President Obama “embarrassed” the United States (especially remember they all boiled down to “He isn’t white”) and compare the right’s unjustified outrage then with their ignorant support for the actual damage the current president is doing.

My next sentence, which you did not quote, even allowed that I could be wrong. So it is difficult for me to understand how that makes me a liar. Was I trying to intentionally deceive you – by allowing that I could be wrong?

So you think I was wrong that modern humans will have a difficult time killing 760,000,000 people in order to top Genghais Kahn’s 10%. Fine. I read your words differently (i.e. Easily got over is that bar given . . .) – but I will accept that you are not eager for us to kill off 10% of our population so we can get over the bar set by Kahn.

That does not make me a liar.

I don’t understand how my position on gun control has anything to do with being a bigot. I think banning semi-automatic weapons would violate the 2nd amendment. Pretty color blind. I think people of all colors can buy semi-automatic weapons – pretty color blind. You will have to unpack the bigotry charge for me, as I have no idea what you are talking about.

I always find it amusing when someone libels a lawyer. Don’t worry – I won’t sue you for your libel – it is just funny, that is all.

So repeatedly demonstrating your comments about climate change are crafted to misrepresent the science, with you repeatedly denying it and then making the same intentional misrepresentations doesn’t make you (in your mind) a liar? You are either immensely delusional or more hard-core in your dishonesty than you have made yourself seem.

You have never “demonstrating your comments about climate change are crafted to misrepresent the science”. You just say stuff like that a lot. That is your opinion about my opinion – but has not been established.

I don’t think I am a liar.

I only write stuff I believe – even when I say I am not a liar.

What a shock!

I think you are wrong about the science. If I said that 100 times, would that make you a liar? Why your denial would be proof that you are a liar.

No – I don’t play that game.

I just assume that we should agree to disagree. That our opinions are different and that we see the science differently. That you dismiss the science I cite and I dismiss the science you cite – that this is normal human behavior. People disagree – what else is knew.

Oh – I know – calling people who disagree with you a liar and a bigot. That is new.

BBD and others have shown your comments about climate science are always wrong, yet you continue with the same lies about what the science says. The results of the science don’t change because you choose to say they are wrong — they simply mean that your repeated statements that the results aren’t what the scientists say but what you think is a lie. The childish “winning” comment is pathetic — as is your behavior.

I think you are wrong about the science. If I said that 100 times, would that make you a liar? Why your denial would be proof that you are a liar.

No – I don’t play that game.

I just assume that we should agree to disagree. That our opinions are different and that we see the science differently.

Science – as has been explained many times here – isn’t just an opinion. It is an understanding of nature based on probability derived from multiple lines of evidence. Keyword: consilience.

Now only a liar or an idiot or the bastard child of the two could persist for as long as you have in pretending that you can ‘see the science differently’. You cannot do that. The probability, derived from the scientific evidence, is what it is. Inflexibly holding a contrary opinion on the basis of a tiny handful of studies with well-documented methodological limitations isn’t a scientifically valid position. Keeping it up for years in the face of endless correction is just dishonest (or stupid, or both).

“Now only a liar or an idiot or the bastard child of the two could persist for as long as you have in pretending that you can ‘see the science differently’. You cannot do that. ”

I disagree (again).

You see, it is my opinion that ECS is at the lower end of the range of 1.5C to 4.5C of the famous IPCC consensus.

I am within “the science”, since “the science” encompasses the entire range of 1.5C to 4.5C for ECS. So naturally, I don’t agree with you.

So when I disagree with you or dean or Lionel all I am really saying is I think ECS is at the lower end of the range and you guys think ECS is higher than I do.

This is all ok and perfectly acceptable (well at least to the rest of the world).

Only here is it NOT allowed to think ECS is at the lower end of the consensus range. According to you only 3.0C or higher is permitted, despite what the IPCC says.

Until the range changes, I am “permitted” to hold whatever opinion I wish to hold, which is consistent with the range. I think it is 1.8C ish, which is consistent with the observationally constrained values found by Lewis and Curry, which is the “science” I find most persuasive. You think they are wrong and discount their “science” in favor of your own (what you find most persuasive).

This is normal and it is ok that you think one thing and I think another.

Until the IPCC changes the range, I will maintain my opinion – because my opinion is consistent with actual observations and actual data (you know – science). The models upon which you rely, which forecast the future, are probably wrong (in my opinion) – but we will have to wait to see.

You see – until more data come in, which allow a tightening of the range (or a changing of the range – if it cannot be tightened), you cannot rule out that I am correct – just as I cannot rule out that you or dean or Lionel are correct. That is because we are all within the PDF of what is physically possible according to the IPCC (which in turn summarized “the science”).

All we can say to each other is I think your opinion is wrong or you think my opinion is wrong.

“Science” does not yet say who is right or wrong (in my opinion of course).

I used to think that when CO2 hit 560 ppm we would know who is right or wrong – but I have learned since 2010 that ECS is a model specific metric and actually knowing the temperature difference difference between 280 ppm and 560 ppm would tell us something important. Now I know that even the TCR is model specific and has nothing to do with the actual temperature difference between 280 ppm and 560 ppm. So in reality, ECS and TCR mean nothing, because the models will keep changing and no one will ever know what ECS is or TCR is, or agree on what they are.

I still hold out hope that if we ever do hit 560 ppm, that science will use the doubling of CO2 and the temperature difference between those two points to learn something about whether the model ECS and TCR should be adjusted up or down – but who knows! We will have to wait for 560 ppm to see what happens.

In the meantime, I still read the science and have not yet seen anything which has changed my mind from what it was in 2010. But then again, the IPCC range is the same now as it was in 2010, so I am still within the range and within the science (in my opinion).

So long story short – I think you are wrong. Both about how science works and about my opinion in particular.

Only here is it NOT allowed to think ECS is at the lower end of the consensus range. According to you only 3.0C or higher is permitted, despite what the IPCC says.

Science deals in probability. The likelihood of ECS being below 2C is vanishingly small. The likelihood of you understanding this is even smaller because you’ve decided to believe in a rightwing ex-banker’s statistical trickery instead of the overwhelming majority of scientific evidence pointing to an ECS of about 3C.

Until the range changes, I am “permitted” to hold whatever opinion I wish to hold, which is consistent with the range. I think it is 1.8C ish, which is consistent with the observationally constrained values found by Lewis and Curry, which is the “science” I find most persuasive. You think they are wrong and discount their “science” in favor of your own (what you find most persuasive).

It is clearly understood that there is a methodological bias in L&C which results in underestimates of S. This is well documented and I have linked the relevant studies for you before.

The AR5 range was distorted by a couple of what you mistakenly call ‘observational’ estimates but being painfully conservative as it is, the IPCC WG1 decided to lower the lower bound to 1.5C.

AR6 will almost certainly return the lower bound of the range to 2C reflecting the now well understood limitations of the EBM methodology – misleadingly termed ‘observational’ by those peddling a political agenda – notably Lewis and Curry.

When this happens, will you abandon the 1.8C underestimate you find so persuasive?

In the meantime, I still read the science and have not yet seen anything which has changed my mind from what it was in 2010.

No you don’t.

You read rubbish on blogs by the likes of Curry. I’ve had ample opportunity to assess the extent of your topic knowledge and it is fucking abysmal. You’ve never actually read any of the primary literature and claiming that you have is simply a lie.

Yes I do, and I also understand when somebody is trying to evade that charge by claiming they could be wrong, a statement I did at first include in the copy and paste but decided that it didn’t add anything being a stand alone sentence, paragraph even.

That was one puerile manoeuvre to evade. Lawyers are renowned for being economical with the actualite and there are many occasions when they are indeed lying and you persist in this habit.

The effects of climate change with a rising total from extreme weather events globally, with Japan being the latest contributor.

Then there is the severe dislocation of the populations of large territories over conflict for resources or migration away from lack of basic essentials such as potable water. Currently the situation in the Middle East and Central America also Africa.

Communities in the US are not immune from lack of available clean water.

The rising tide of pollution including attendant endocrine disrupters.

Then of course those murdered by repressive regimes – Saudi Arabia, Israel, Myanmar and more.

Do you notice the colon “:” at the end of the statement you say was a mistake. That makes all the other stuff I quoted above part of it. Excuse me for reading this that you thought it would be easy to get over the hurdle of all the stuff you said killing 10% of the population.

Come on – you are just digging your hole deeper.

Pick something else to try to show I am a liar – because you are not getting any traction with your current choice. You are just showing that I was right in my original assessment.

So you’re happy to deny the negative impact of human-emitted fossil carbon, until you are called on it and then the emissions become an issue?! Grow a pair petal, as soon as you’ve grown a brain that functions rationally.

What people do when faced by liars who won’t ever admit that they have no argument. People who don’t understand probability distributions or methodological bias or the fact that Lewis is a rightwing ex-banker peddling an agenda and Curry is aiding him in peddling a political agenda.

Thank you for admitting that you cannot prove I am a liar.

Lying again. I wrote:

Your persistent refusal to admit that science isn’t an opinion and that there is no symmetry between your denialism and scientific evidence makes you a liar.

I misunderstood your post and thought you were referring to what I quoted as the copy and paste. Now on a re-read I see you were referring to my other sentence about possibly being wrong.

I disagree that what I said was a lie (still). I honestly thought you were indicating that we could easily kill 10% of the world population with the list of items you set forth. But I accept that I was wrong and even thought it possible that I could be wrong when I wrote it.

Before, Trump was accused of being Pro-Putin.
Trump goes to NATO and attacks Germany for making deals with Russia, calls Merkel Putin’s puppet, and says all they are doing is making Russia rich.
Trump is accused of breaking up NATO and being Pro Putin.

Germany agreed to boost defense spending to 2% of GDP by 2024, and now is changing the target to 1.5% by 2025, and so far, the defense percentage has slightly declined.

What a perfect example of psychological projection! Trump attacks Germany for making deals with Russia ( which Trump has done; beautry pagents, attempted real estate developments among other deals ) and then calls Merkel Putin’s puppet, which is what Trump is ( remember Trumps’ exclusive interview with Russia Today? Why did they have to redecorate that room shortly after… maybe so they could tear up the walls and make a thorough bug sweep?)

And Trump accuses others of making Russia rich.
You know what makes Russia rich? What makes Russia rich is Trump and all the other science-free a-holes who deny climate change. Conservation and alternative fuels hurt Russia. So what do the Trump people push? The elimination of conservation regulations and the promotion of alternative fuels. Just what Putin wants.

Steve, that is a defiance of basic economics. Ask yourself why Russia and the Middle East are financing environmental groups and anti-fracking movies in the US. Reducing competition to their supplies is paramount. Trump’s boosting of oil and coal hurts Russia’s bottom line, along with Iran, Qatar, and other oil suppliers. Boosting renewable energy and reducing America’s output would provide Russia more money. We already see this with how Russia is selling energy to Europe. They have restricted their own production so much, it gives Russia an opening.

Supply and demand. Replacing fossil fuels with alternative energy sources does what exactly to the fossil fuel market? It decreased demand for fossil fuel. My conserving energy , along with a million or a billion other people, does what exactly to the demand for energy. It depresses it. What is the main source of income for Russia? As of 2012, oil and gas accounted for 52% of Russian government revenues and over 70% of total exports. It is in the interest of Putin to deny climate change. Buying the biggest SUV and Dodge Truck you can with the most inefficient engine does what to the demand for energy? It increases it a tiny bit. Multiply that tiny bit by a million other assholes doing the same thing as you and what do you get? Increased demand for gasoline and support for higher gas prices.

The biggest consumer of fossil fuels is the transportation sector. Pruitt pushing back efforts to increase fuel economy increased the demand for god damned fucking fossil fuels. It pushed it up. All the oil suppliers profit from Pruitt’s actions. All of Trump’s friends, in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and Russia profit.

Bringing back coal just ensures air pollution, deaths from mining disasters, and a mega-scale hazardous waste disposal cost. Just where should we put all those millions of gallons of coal ash slurry if we can’t put it in your lungs? Coal is dying a natural death brought about by other cheaper sources of energy such as natural gas and solar. “Bringing back” coal is not happening. And it is not hurting Russia one fucking bit.

Russia is afraid of a world where China manufactures wind turbines and solar panels in ever increasing abundance and demand for fossil fuels continually decreases.

Russia is financing all sorts of efforts to turn Americans against each other. As to their supposed financing of environmental groups, that is laughable to an environmentalist, but, well, that would just balance Russia’s support of the NRA, now, wouldn’t it? I would be more concerned about how many more votes Putin has in US elections than you have. You have just one vote. He is influencing tens of thousands by any reasonable calculation and hey, that is great when you and Putin support the same fascist ( Trump), but what about some day when Putin supports something that you don’t really like? LIke abortion or sterilization of people who don’t support Putin? At that point, you have a real problem. Kiss your democracy bye bye.

What you are saying is true if the renewable energy is price competitive with Russia’s energy supplies. If not, the demand will always be there. Just because Europe and the US cut back on fossil fuels, doesn’t mean the whole world will. Already EU+US CO2 emissions is at about the same level as China + India.

Unnecessary. There are many more and much more relevant comparisons. Oh, I see, you were just trying to make it seem as if it is a joke or delusion that an American president seems to be edging toward fascism. Don’t worry, Americans can’t seem to recognize a clear and present danger until after it becomes a reality for them personally.

Germany gets about 36% of its energy from renewables last time I checked, and the amount is continually rising. What was that you said about renewable energy being competitive? Who is eating whose lunch ?

In a global economy, which, like it or not, we are in, if the US and Europe cut down on the use of fossil fuels, that lowers the global demand for fossil fuels, doesn’t it.

About 33% of India’s installed capacity for power generation is renewables.

China’s installed power generation capacity was around 36.6% in 2017, and it is still growing, and it is the world’s leading country in electricity production from renewable energy sources.

And even the US consumption for energy is satisfied around 15% by renewables.

I get so tired of the bullshit about India and China consuming fossil fuels so we should keep banging our head against that wall too. What a totally Russian, oil propagandist argument. The top energy consumers in the world after the US are already pushing their renewable capacity past one third renewable. And growing. And what is Russia’s main export? Fossil energy! And it is going out of style! How unfortunate for Vladimir. Smart people don’t want to buy his toxic crap when they can avoid it. And now, more and more, they can.

But don’t worry. The GOP and its right wing allies will come to the rescue of the Russian Mob. Maybe the GOP mascot should be a sheep with Russian flag coloration.

Just about everything that Trump does helps Russia. Screaming at Germany for making deals with Russia for energy is just a distraction from the larger issue. And that is that Trump is acting like a pawn for Putin, and the GOP has enabled this child-brained tyrant. Better wake up, righties, because you are not exactly acting in your best interests. You are acting like a bunch of InfoWars intoxicated sheep.

Well, trump could begin telling the truth, eliminate his business conflicts of interest, denounce all of the racism he has so far encouraged, and more — but that would cost him his support, he’d be kicked out of the republican party, and be called a communist by mikeN and other low-minded folks. Decency isn’t tolerated on the right in these times.

Steve, separate hydro and nuclear and redo the renewable numbers.
What you are missing is that any push for renewables that is based on mandates is dues to concerns about global warming, so inevitably this will be coupled with restrictions on production of fossil fuels. So the lower demand in Europe and US will also produce lower supply. Russia will benefit. Why do you think she signs on to all these global warming agreements?

So you think the IPCC was tricked into lowering the bottom end of the range from 2.0C to 1.5C in AR5. I don’t think the IPCC agrees with you, or they would not have lowered the bottom end of the range back down to 1.5C (where it has been since 1990). The IPCC thinks they were mistaken to raise it to 2.0C and corrected their error.

I have no idea what AR6 will do to the range. I will wait and see. If AR6 raises the range to 2.0C again, I will read their reasons for doing so and see what Lewis and Curry say about that and decide what I think based on that. I do not know what my future self will think today, because I do not know what the future will hold.

All I know is you cannot badger me into changing my mind, and I find the observationally based studies of Lewis and Curry very persuasive. I have read the papers, the critics responses and the responses to the responses and still find the Lewis and Curry approach persuasive.

You are free to disagree.

We should start a pool on whether AR6 will raise the lower end of the ECS range. I have $1.00 USD that they leave it alone. I don’t think they will make the same mistake twice – but that is just my opinion. Or maybe they will raise it to 1.75C (wouldn’t that be funny).

Now that I know that ECS and TCR cannot be computed from real world data, and can only be derived from a particular model, and vary from model to model, I wonder more than ever what good they are?

I still wait for a doubling of CO2 from 280 to 560 to measure the instantaneous temperature difference at the doubling point. I think that will be an interesting number and will hopefully shed light on the models and therefore ECS and TCR.

So you think the IPCC was tricked into lowering the bottom end of the range from 2.0C to 1.5C in AR5.

No, I don’t think that and I didn’t say it. You just made it up.

I have no idea what AR6 will do to the range. I

That’s because you don’t ‘read the science’. If you did, you would know that the lower estimates from EBMs are known to be underestimates arising from methodological bias.

I will read their reasons for doing so and see what Lewis and Curry say about that and decide what I think based on that.

So for you, a rightwing retired banker peddling a political viewpoint with the help of JC carries more weight that all the rest of the scientific evidence. That’s a perfect example of denialism.

All I know is you cannot badger me into changing my mind, and I find the observationally based studies of Lewis and Curry very persuasive. I have read the papers, the critics responses and the responses to the responses and still find the Lewis and Curry approach persuasive.

You haven’t read anything and you are lying again. Anyone who understands what L&C tried to do knows why it’s problematic. Only people who are using Lewis’s stuff as a sciencey fig leaf for their denialism spout crap like you do.

Now that I know that ECS and TCR cannot be computed from real world data, and can only be derived from a particular model, and vary from model to model, I wonder more than ever what good they are?

LOL. How the fuck do you think L&C derived their estimates? What is an EBM – an Energy Balance MODEL?

… I find the observationally based studies of Lewis and Curry very persuasive.

You find them persuasive because you want to find them persuasive.

The lower-end values are included in the IPCC assessments because the IPCC reviews all the literature, including the least rigorous, because they understand from a statistical perspective the impact of less rigourous* papers in the overall quality of the research. They know that this limitation in some of the literature should be spread randomly across the ranges of results being assessed, and are therefore aware that there is a central tendency toward the mean.

Your belief in an extremely low value for ECS is like believing that the child with black eyes, a broken jaw, cigarette burns on her arms really did fall off the roof of the house, bounced off the family car and through the lounge room window, and onto her father’s ashtray. “Nothing to see here, all is well, the kids should stay with her parents” – whilst any objective and parsimonious doctor or judicial agent would vehemently argue for removing the child from further domestic violence…

Now that I know that ECS and TCR cannot be computed from real world data…

Bollocks.

I still wait for a doubling of CO2 from 280 to 560 to measure the instantaneous temperature difference at the doubling point.

“Instantaneous?!” Why would you wait for the instantaneous moment when equilibrium climate response requires decades to centuries for the final impacts to manifest? Unless, of course, you’re hoping to mask the true magnitude of ECS…

And by the way, if “ECS and TCR cannot be computed from real world data” why would you “wait for a doubling of CO2?”

[*Rigour can be either deliberate, due to the cognitive biases of the researchers, or inadvertent, due to the lack of experience of the researchers or the unsophistication of methodologies and knowledge in the filed.]

So you think the IPCC was tricked into lowering the bottom end of the range from 2.0C to 1.5C in AR5.

With that you betray your lank of understanding of the processes of the IPCC which is collating, and using, all the best scientific evidence available at the time the report is put to bed by international agreement including with counties that have strong fossil fuel interests and thus like to lower the bar set by the science to politically acceptable values.

The latest assessment report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) estimates that climate sensitivity has a “likely” range of 1.5 to 4.5C.

The new study, published in Nature, refines this estimate to 2.8C, with a corresponding range of 2.2 to 3.4C. If correct, the new estimates could reduce the uncertainty surrounding climate sensitivity by 60%.

The narrower range suggests that global temperature rise is “going to shoot over 1.5C” above pre-industrial levels, the lead author tells Carbon Brief, but “we might be able to avoid 2C”. Meeting either limit will likely require negative emissions technologies that can remove CO2 from the atmosphere, he says.

The new estimate is another “brick in the wall” of scientists’ understanding of climate sensitivity, another scientist tells Carbon Brief, and “the best-informed views will be reached by multiple lines of evidence”.

Note the fake blockquote html tags with a rogue space inserted before the > to ensure they appear rather than being ‘live’. strong with /strong bold tags can also be used and maybe i with /i italic too.

Says the guy who dismisses the vast majority of scientific evidence pointing at an ECS of ~3C in favour of a couple of outlier studies with known issues by a retired rightwing banker pushing a political agenda and, er, Judith Curry. Who has zero credibility left these days because she’s been peddling crap for so long nobody takes her seriously anymore. Which is entirely her own fault.

Yale Environment 360.
Renewables Have Been Germany’s Top Source of Electricity For the Last Six Months
Renewable energy met more of Germany’s electricity needs than coal during the first six months of 2018 — the longest period that renewables have been the country’s largest source of energy to date. According to new data from the German Association of Energy and Water Industries (BDEW), 36.3 percent of Germany’s electricity was generated by solar, wind, hydropower, and biogas between January and June of this year, while coal provided only 35.1 percent.

Coal has clearly beaten solar and wind for the first six months of 2018, as seen in BBD’s link. Each single month, the two coals combined for more than the total of solar and wind. Generally, one coal beats wind, and the other beats solar. It is hydro and biomass that is making up the difference.
Nevertheless, if renewable is so great, why is Germany agreeing to a gas pipeline from Russia?

Yes, the figures are potentially misleading. Actual electricity generation in German year to 12 July 2018 was 59% nonrenewables vs 41% renewables.

However, if you break it down a little further, you see that wind, solar, biomass and hydro contributed 41% while coal (brown + hard) contributed 37.8%. Add in gas and the nonrenewables total increases to ~45%.

Non climate topic: if you watched the republican clowns toss conspiracies around and not let agent Strzok answer questions today you saw what the old Stalin era show trials were like. The level of dishonesty and denial of facts demonstrated by the republicans rivals is astounding. Scary to watch — at least for people who aren’t disconnected from reality.

Strzok was being quite dishonest. First he claimed it was a voluntary appearance, when he had been served with a subpoena. Gowdy should have waived the signed sheet.

Later on, Strzok said he couldn’t recall writing a text message, moments after he gave the time of day, said it was off the cuff, and gave the context of the text referring to Khan and that it was the result of Trump’s horrible and disgusting behavior.

Main highlights between Republican grandstanding and asking questions that they really weren’t going to get answers for about bias and an ongoing investigation, were Strzok deciding to pass the buck to Comey and Priestap and saying they ordered him off Hillary investigation and onto Russia, and saying that Bruce Ohr, whose wife was hired in 2016 by Fusion GPS after Hillary campaign hired them, delivered the dossier to the FBI.

I really don’t see how someone can look at the evidence and say that coal has beaten renewables in Germany for the first six months of 2018. Why don’t you tell us the numbers that you are looking at and how you came to that conclusion.

“Germany has crossed a symbolic milestone in its energy transition by briefly covering around 100 percent of electricity use with renewables for the first time ever on 1 January. In the whole of last year, the world’s fourth largest economy produced a record 36.1 percent of its total power needs with renewable sources. ”

So, MikeN, how do you say that coal has clearly beaten renewables for the first six months of 2018? Are you innumerate? I don’t get it. I make a statement, you are presented evidence, and you just deny the evidence, and deny my statement. Weird. Care to explain?

Steve, you are correct. My comparison was to solar+wind, which are the ones that tend to get the subsidies.
If you separate hydro and biomass from the renewable category, coal wins. I’m not familiar with biomass, and am surprised Germany’s number is so high.

Regarding Trey Gowdy; he represents the worst of American values. He was just exercising his god given right as a white southern man to torture another human being . That’s all. He is a useless fuck, and is little more than an instrument of right wing authoritarian repression. The worst of the worst. We seem to be sliding into a black hole of ignorance and cruelty. This is not a good thing.

It is almost impossible to keep track of all the lies Gowdy and the other right-wing scum tossed out — but I’m sure mikeN will regurgitate them in one of his usual ejaculations of conspiracy and thinly veiled “but Obama wasn’t white so all of this is ok” posts.

Lots of people were saying that national security is at risk if the Nunes memo is made public. Yet it was made public, and I see no national security damage in there.
Now, I saw a hearing where Dems were again eager for the public not to hear answers to questions, even more hysterically so this time.
When did the investigation start, before or after July 31, seems like something Strzok can answer without compromising an investigation.

Biomass is any remainders of living stuff that can be burned. That would include things like wood, agricultural waste, food garbage, algae, oil from algae, and methane from decomposing sewage or landfills. It bypasses the major argument against fossil fuels because biomass is burning carbon that recently came from the atmosphere, and it doesn’t draw from the bank of millions of years old fossil waste. Biomass doesn’t force more carbon into the atmosphere that wasn’t there a few years ago anyway. Biomass uses recycled carbon. Biomass doesn’t overload the atmosphere with carbon stashed away a million years ago. Biomass is renewable.

Subsidies for solar and wind don’t bother me a bit, and Trump has probably killed many or most of the federal ones by now, so the point is mute. Encouraging people to use wind and solar instead of energy types that cause deaths seems like an appropriate thing to do if you look at the scientific evidence. However, looking at the basic scientific evidence seems to have gone out of style throughout much of the Republican party. Germany, on the other hand, is still a pretty sharp nation science wise, and they get the big picture, and they embrace things like extracting energy from biomass.

“Dev Millstein of Lawerence Berkeley National Laboratory and his colleagues find that the fossil fuels not burnt because of wind and solar energy helped avoid between 3,000 and 12,700 premature deaths in the US between 2007 and 2015. Fossil fuels produce large amounts of pollutants like carbon dioxide, sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxides, and particulate matter, which are responsible for ill-health and negative climate effects.”

“Now, I saw a hearing where Dems were again eager for the public not to hear answers to questions”

Yeah, amazing that some people are opposed about making public the details of an ongoing investigation — especially one that is operating at such high levels.

No wait, that shouldn’t be amazing at all: inner workings of investigations aren’t released. What is amazing is the acceptance of the idea that the details should be released simply because the people asking the questions have been dishonest about the reasons they’re pissed. Your support for people like Gowdy and Nunes, who have demonstrated they are serial liars, doesn’t do anything for your reputation.

Stupid yes, but no more stupid than the other conspiracies you push. No more stupid than people on the right can believe either: I have in-laws who swear that President Obama’s policies caused them to lose their business — in 2006.

The price of renewables like wind and solar is still dropping. It even looks like new natural gas plants of today are liable to become stranded assetts in a decade or two because of the competitiveness of wind and solar.

If these renewables are becoming so cheap, then there should be no subsidies or mandates for them, and global warming doesn’t need to be worried about too much either.

Just build some transmission lines and everything’s good. China and India will adopt solar and wind along with the rest of the developing world, and they are responsible for more than 70% of emissions. Europe and US will of course do so.
So no more carbon taxes too.

I think the incessant repetition of the ‘cheap W&S’ meme is extremely dangerous. It’s essentially a false prospectus which has confused and misled policy makers.

The misrepresentation hinges on the false claim that batteries are the complete storage solution to W&S intermittency. Batteries are appropriate technology to smooth short-duration intermittency (hours) but they cannot provide the very large capacity for dealing with longer periods of intermittency (days, weeks).

The only known technology capable of backing up a regional / national scale wind resource is PHES, and PHES is very expensive indeed and not falling in price at all.

But countries in Northern Europe experience very low winter solar output and periodic episodes of anticyclonic conditions that very significantly reduce wind output for days at a time. Without a large-scale PHES reserve (or gas) there will be nothing to power these nations after the first few hours of low windspeeds drain the short-term battery reserves.

So when I see plans to scale W&S in countries like the UK and Germany alongside rhetoric about cheap batteries and the death of gas, I want to bang my head on the corner of my desk.

If we want to get rid of gas backup in the NH extratropics and above, then we need PHES, and lots of it.

BBD, the Vox link says battery storage is cheaper than the gas peakers. Are you saying this price does not work at scale?

Batteries don’t work at scale full stop. You can’t engineer battery arrays that can handle for example 60% of German supply for a week. The only thing that can provide the TWh capacity required is PHES. A lot of it.

I agree with BBD about batteries.
However this
“The only known technology capable of backing up a regional / national scale wind resource is PHES, …”
is wrong.
Although it’s not suitable in very many places, and has environmental concerns, there is little doubt pumped hydro is a ” known technology “.
Another technology ( sort of ) is to use a lot bloody less electricity in the first place. Way to much manufacturing involved in making rubbish products.
I sort of like an analogy of a ” war effort “.
Do we need at this time to use electrical and natural resources to make hanggliders? Bath toys? Bitcoin mining?
Cat food? Souvineer spoons and plates?
Sports stadiums? A gobsmacking huge array of dirt bikes? Fucking domestic dishwashing machines? Stiletto shoes?

agree with BBD about batteries.
However this
“The only known technology capable of backing up a regional / national scale wind resource is PHES, …”
is wrong.
Although it’s not suitable in very many places, and has environmental concerns, there is little doubt pumped hydro is a ” known technology “.

I don’t understand what you are getting at – you seem to agree with me? Perhaps I should have written “the only technology capable of backing up a regional / national scale wind [and solar] resource is PHES”.

And I agree that the scale of PHES required is going to result in considerable environmental damage, often to upland wilderness which in a perfect world should be left the fuck alone.

Another technology ( sort of ) is to use a lot bloody less electricity in the first place. Way to much manufacturing involved in making rubbish products.

Yes, we should waste less energy on producing crap for the consumerist hamster wheel. But the demand side management meme runs counter to the necessary “electrify everything” process of decarbonisation. This involves electrifying whatever we can that currently runs on fossil fuels, from heating and industrial processes to transport. The result will be a significant increase in demand for electricity and a reliable, 24/7 supply.

I was thinking, ” Why has BBD seemingly very suddenly out of nowhere a huge fan of pumped heat as big part of the solution. He/she isn’t really a biased spruiker for any particular thing. Just wants to get the best possible answers, whatever they may be. Very odd. And then makes out hydro dosnt even exist!!!! “.
Lol. Glad that’s cleared up.
Besides obvious environmental destruction ( pretty much 100% underwater for all the flora and fauna ) and access roads clearing , etc, there’s something so nice about hydro. It’s so simple.
One thing I can see especially about pumped hydro as a battery is that reservoirs could be put ( geology depending ) where no one would consider putting conventional hydro.
There must be huge valleys or very high up valleys, in some places, with very small volume unworthwhile ( for traditional hydro ) natural catchments.
Problem then is ya need 2 reservoirs ( double the environmental damage!!!! ),
One high and one low.
Purpose built pumped hydro should ideally be close to the wind and/or solar
production as well, further limiting sites. Damn It!
It still seems to me to be a very good “battery” to supply baseload when the
wind slows and/or it’s dark.

Ya know what the problem is? The overarching problem? Many people have gotten used to an outrageously high standard of living.
Christ, my own standard of living is well in excess of say, Queen Victoria, and I’m still not happy!
A lot of cattle stations switch off their gensets at night and therefore have zero electricity for a few hours but no one would say they have a low standard of living.
Maybe industry needs to adapt to working with the power they can get, rather than a free for all. Might mean rethinking shift lengths and schedules.
8 or 10 hour workdays in a factory may not be condusive to getting us out of the shit. I’m sort of thinking of a ” let’s get real and have a look at every part of the equation ” thing, rather than an unlimited power free for all 24 hours a day thing that alternative energy sources must supply or it means they are no good. Wind and solar is clearly good. Just might mean working with it and dropping a coal station mentality.

Nature doesn’t care about per capita or cumulative. 70% of emissions now with a higher percentage in the future are coming from World-(US+EU). This number as an absolute amount of CO2 emissions will drop rapidly if solar and wind and other renewable are getting as cheap as claimed.

If fossil fuel is such a great thing, why do its supporters have to continually lie, misrepresent, and propagandize against clean energy? And why do so many right wing media types lie about ridiculous conspiracies depicting evil motives behind the push to reduce fossil fuel use?

The have to lie, misrepresent, and distort because it is a huge source of wealth transfer. As long as people are dependent on a toxic, polluting, climate changing, ocean acidifying energy source, oil oligarchs like Putin, the Kochs, the Saudis, the Kuwaitis, etc. have a steady income stream into their treasuries. The reason fossil fuel supporters continually harass, annoy, and taunt people interested in investigating and understanding climate change is because the leaders of fossil fuel supporters have a vested interest in keeping their fat treasuries fat. That’s all. Or, I should say, that’s oil.

And the results of climate change are becoming clearer with passing time.

“Iceberg production in Greenland has been increasing in the past 100 years as climate change has become stronger,” he said, while the rising number of icebergs were in turn “increasing the tsunami hazards”.

Question. I’ve heard it quite often that UK went to war in Europe in WW2 to fight against fascists and nazis( a subset?).
I’m just wondering if this is a fair characterisation for the reason for going to war.
It seems to me UK was pissed primarily about
invaders of Poland and they just happened to be Nazis.
Didn’t give a shit about Spain by the looks of things.
Is this a reasonable observation?
Unreasonable?
Thanks.

Don’t be so asinine. Your original statement quoted wasn’t about that.

But to those who have produced the greater atmospheric burden of CO2 should go the political need to do something about. Sure nature will do what nature does but humans have been prodding the beast as Wallace Broecker describes it:

The palaeoclimate record shouts out to us that, far from being self-stabilizing, the Earth’s climate system is an ornery beast which overreacts even to small nudges.

It was entirely about that. You focus on the word ‘responsibility’, but my point was with the assumption of cheap renewables(which BBD on cue chimed in that this is not a safe assumption), there is no need to do anything, and I explained why.

“If fossil fuel is such a great thing, why do its supporters have to continually lie, misrepresent, and propagandize against clean energy? And why do so many right wing media types lie about ridiculous conspiracies depicting evil motives behind the push to reduce fossil fuel use?

The have to lie, misrepresent, and distort because it is a huge source of wealth transfer. As long as people are dependent on a toxic, polluting, climate changing, ocean acidifying energy source, oil oligarchs like Putin, the Kochs, the Saudis, the Kuwaitis, etc. have a steady income stream into their treasuries. The reason fossil fuel supporters continually harass, annoy, and taunt people interested in investigating and understanding climate change is because the leaders of fossil fuel supporters have a vested interest in keeping their fat treasuries fat. That’s all. Or, I should say, that’s oil.”

Yep. Seen them. Amazing footage.
I’m very intreagued by glaciers, icebergs, great big landslides and other things we don’t really have in Australia.
Erosion dosnt really have the same excitement level as a rock slide!

Stop changing the subject just because you’ve been caught out lying on behalf of the FF industry and its sponsored politicians.

Backing up industry shills is not a good look, BillyR. Not at all.

My low carbon lifestyle is of no relevance to your enthusiastic support for climate liars. But you mentioned hypocrisy, so let’s look at that. Where is the hypocrisy in lobbying for emissions reductions and making whatever personal choices are practical to minimise personal FF use? There’s no hypocrisy there.

You should be careful which words you throw around. One might come back and bite you in the arse.

I missed your repeating the “DNC destroyed the server” myth comment. You right-wing morons seem to be suckers for things that didn’t happen.

The emails at the core of the non-issue that was puffed up were not on a single server, and there was no need for the FBI to have physical access to the machines in question. They were given all of the images (by their own admission they received all of the images, with data and everything else needed for their investigation).

I know you, like billyR, prefer a purely fictional conspiracy to facts, but reality doesn’t give a shit what you prefer. Neither should anyone with a functioning thought process.

“”I would credit America’s Shale Revolution, which started in about 2007, as the main driver behind the CO2 reductions, especially because of the substitution of natural gas for coal to generate electric power in the US—which will likely continue,” Perry told the Washington Free Beacon.

Compared to coal, natural gas releases about half of the carbon emissions to create the same amount of electric power. Coal’s share of energy sources for electricity has fallen below 30 percent in the last decade as natural shale gas became more abundant, according to Perry.”

Now you can thank your local FFF industry for this achievement. BTW, your friends
in Red China are the worst producers of carbon but friends never blame friends. They do not need a government handout, like your friends in the Peak Green Energy Industry, providing less than 1% of the planet energy needs.

Honestly, dealing with the lame brain left, is like dealing with a five year old.

“My low carbon lifestyle is of no relevance to your enthusiastic support for climate liars. But you mentioned hypocrisy, so let’s look at that. Where is the hypocrisy in lobbying for emissions reductions and making whatever personal choices are practical to minimise personal FF use? There’s no hypocrisy there.”

We don’t need your stinking lobbying – it’s less than worthless.

Want do we want – Central Planners; when do we want them – NOW!!
Shrieks for freaks.

Second, the decline in US emissions is multifactoral. While increasing use of gas is a key driver, it is not by any means the only one. Nor will it lead to significant decarbonisation as gas is still a fossil fuel.

So for all the bluster, you don’t actually have a point. And you still haven’t shown me where the hypocrisy was either.

First, we’ve known about the decline, which started years ago, by the way, so we didn’t miss the headline then , did we? You are the one who is late to the realization.

Second, we’ve known that coal has a higher carbon content then natural gas since, maybe, sixth grade? Home schooled were you?

Implying that people concerned about climate change are automatically friends of Red China is one of your weakest statements of the morning. But you are good at weak. And distortion. And mislabeling. And it does fit in with your right wing meme-lie about climate change being a Chinese invention. I guess you guys never stumbled across Arrhenius in chemistry class. Or Fourier. Or Tyndall. But I bet you know your BuyBull real gud though!

From Forbes. :”In 2015 overall demand for energy in the U.S. fell by 20 MMtoe. … Renewables chipped in an additional 5 MMtoe of demand. ” MMtoe is million metric tons of oil equivalent.

Regarding central planners… you are equating awareness of scientifically established facts with desire for central planning. There is no equivalence there. If a scientific fact unites most of the scientists in the world, and they just want people to wake up to this fact and do something about it , I suppose that a fool might consider that to look like central planning. A universal or near univeral realization is not equivalent to desire for central planning. BTW, don’t corporations and corporatocracies essentially just represent another form of central planning? Or is that realization beyond you?

I suggest a new unit of measure, Billy, the MMtse. It would stand for million metric tons of stupid equivalent. You get about six units for this post. Congratulations!!

Well, I’ll let you get back to kissing Putin’s ass and doing his bidding.
What is Russia’s main export, again, Billy? Fossil fuel, isn’t it ?
What time is is in St. Petersburg, Billy? Did you make sure to sign your time sheet for last week?

And by the way, could you please come up with something original once in a while? You are getting pretty boring.

The thing I can’t understand is the mentality of shooting oneself in the foot.
And why these people are so angry anyhow.
Fantastically filthy rich. How could they not have insight into their own wealth? Bunch fucking idiots have houses for their cars and fly in jetplanes.
And their angry about it!!!!!
Get fucked dumb yanks.

The thing is – and the Trump votoers should have understood this – is that Trump was telling them what they wanted to hear, not what he really wanted to do with the presidency. He’s the most privileged of the lot, a rabid wolf of wealth accumulation, and he fooled them into believing that he was a lamb.

The “fuck you” for which they voted will turn on to each and every one of them and in a mixing of metaphors (or not…) bite them on their arses.

Obama created laws that stripped Americans of there right to due process of they deemed them bad
Obama created laws to control the media, he gave government oversight to choose what are facts and what aren’t, as well as legalizing government propoganda.
Educate yourself on what facism ACTUALLY means because getting to peacefully protest for your cause, vote, express your opinions without censorship ISN’T IT.
Stop throwing the word around anytime you don’t like someone’s opinion.